Wednesday, June 27, 2001
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Wednesday, June 27, 2001 |
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The things we learn from grandparents By AMY RILEY It is no secret that grandparents are some of the most blessed people on the planet. They carry with them an aura that gives light to the people around them. It is no wonder, nor is it circumstance, that the distinction comes in the autumn of one's life. Grandparenting is a job for the seasoned and the wise. It is a job for those who have been taught by life itself the essential truths, and then honed them with compassion, love, and memory. It is not a job for the hard or hurried. Grandparents accumulate the most bittersweet of human emotions, then pour them out like an elixir in measured doses, as if to set the torch-passing in motion so that we can take up the role ourselves when the time comes. As children, we learn from our grandparents. We learn to do the things that take time and patience, things that are often too tedious for our parents, busy with our actual raising, to teach. From my grandmother I had my first lessons in cooking. Oh, I learned plenty from my mom, too, but my grandmother let me plunge my hands in to a bowl of flour to feel its cool, powdery softness. She let me knead the ground, greasy meat between my fingers to form a meatloaf. She let me lick the batter from the beaters, an experience stolen from my own children by fear of contamination, until the icing, or cookie dough, or cake batter coated my cheeks. She taught me to sew. We sewed one wrap-around skirt that was never worn, and never repeated, but nonetheless etched in my memory. She taught me to crochet and cross-stitch. I crocheted a blanket to match the colors of my room, lime green and yellow, circa 1974. I still have that blanket, and the great big one she crocheted for me when I was in college. I have also the palest yellow one that she crocheted for my first child. They are pieces of her, though I do not have her anymore except in my memory and in my heart. From my grandfather I learned to fish, to tend a garden, to swallow down slimy stewed okra and oysters. For my grandfather, I ate an anchovy so that I could speak with authority when claiming they were gross. I learned to play rummy and poker, to gamble with penny chips, and that you could unfold a paper clip, stick it in the butt end of a cigarette all the way up, and smoke the whole thing without a single ash falling. That was a skill we kept to ourselves. I learned to bait a hook with raw shrimp and live worms. I learned that the hottest, softest inland Florida sand was always cool six inches down. As an adult I learned that grown grandparents cry. I learned that grandfathers die slowly from grief when grandmothers die first. I learned that late in life, people have a need to share early life experiences, and that we can take from it such loamy, life knowledge if we listen. I learned from my grandfather what is was like for my grandmother to be sent to live with his mother, with her three young children in tow, when he was called to service near the end of World War II at the age of 30, after all the younger, abler, single and childless men had gone and served, and come back or not. I learned what it was like to slog through cold wet mushy forests in Germany and Belgium, the smell of it, the taste of it (he never again ate Spam, even grimaced at the mention of it), and of the cold dying that he witnessed as 1944 yielded to 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge. After my grandmother died, when he told me these stories, he told me that when he got home from Europe, my grandmother pulled him into the bathroom of his mother's house to give him a proper welcome home. I remember blushing with the pride of enlightenment that grandparents were also men and women, couples with a romantic history and physical desires that I, as a late century young married twenty-something, naively thought they were long past, or had never known. It's been 10 years since he died, 12 years since my grandmother died, a whole half life for me since my childhood memories of them were scored. They are as real today as ever, maybe more so now that I'm older and have really started to think about life more as one who has lived a fair portion of it, as opposed to one who is just beginning to live it. Now I am a witness to that same transfer of grandness between my parents and my children. I've seen and felt that primal generational shift that occurs when your parents hold that small bundle of life that is yours. I've seen my father whisper to my 5-year-old that pink and purple are his favorite colors, and seen her beam with delight and pronounce that those are her favorite colors, too. I've seen my mom laugh with my 13-year-old, at her wit and premature "other" way of looking at life, and seen the glimmer of recognition that she is a lot like me. I've seen them both engage a young boy, something they never did as parents, buy boy toys, boy clothes, and build boy things. It is a grand thing to see, grand indeed. [Your comments are welcome: AmyRileyOpEd@aol.com (new address).]
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